This invention relates to an automated system for quantitative biopsy analysis of muscle tissue.
Research studies into muscular dysfunction and, in particular, the clinical diagnosis of neuromuscular diseases frequently require a biopsy analysis for the classification and characterization of muscle tissue. By analyzing such characteristics as the size, texture or density of the muscle fibers, neurologists can use the information to more accurately diagnose both the type and severity of each disease. One tool to aid in that effort has been found using the science of histochemistry, wherein the chemical constitution and microscopic anatomy of living cells and tissue are studied on stained microscope slides. While enzyme histochemical methods have been implemented only in the past decade, the techniques have proved to play an essential and significant role in both research and clinical medicine during that relatively short time.
By producing specimens in a manner such that the various types of muscle fibers are distinguishable by color, a quantitative analysis of the muscle tissue may be accomplished. In a normal human being, one would observe that the numbers of each type of muscle fiber are roughly equal and the fiber diameter distributed about a mean value. Although the average fiber diameter in males is usually larger than in females, the sizes of individual fiber diameters typically average approximately fifty microns. It is both the muscular fiber size and the relative proportion of each type of the roughly polygonal fiber shapes which are primarily affected and altered by various neuromuscular diseases. For example, muscular atrophy reduces the mean fiber diameter while, on the other hand, certain diseases produce a disproportionate number of one type of fibers. A record of these abnormal changes can be maintained by a fiber diameter histogram taken for each muscle fiber type. Although use of the histogram in this manner has been shown to be a valuable tool both in the diagnosis of neuromuscular disease and for the research study of the progression of degenerative muscle diseases, the prior art methods of generating the histograms have been painstakingly tedious and unfortunately fraught with human errors. The reasons for this can be found in the approach applied by the prior art, which was subjective in its methodology. In essence, the fiber diameter and the relative proportion of the fiber types to each other were judged visually by the human eye to be either normal or abnormal while, at the same time, the quantitative information available from the specimen was virtually ignored. In other instances, the fiber diameters would be measured by hand on photomicrographs and then fiber diameter histograms were plotted manually from the measurements.